Four easy tips to transform your BFCM customer experience

Hey Squad,

By the time you’re reading this, it’s getting really close to Black Friday, and even closer to awkward conversations with your uncle about bitcoin and the current state of politics.

The big question for this year:

“Did you see the SBX guy from FTF, the altruistic crypto currency guy who defrauded people? Thank goodness I keep my money under my mattress.”

We get it, Uncle Phil. Glad you’re safe.

Well wishes to you and yours–stay sane out there.

This will be a rather quick one because we are all a bit chaotic this week and your inbox is already inundated with early access, standard access, and some spicy new “don’t purchase today and wait until Black Friday” emails.

I usually send these out on Thursday, but I wanted to send it a day early with a few really simple and easy ways to elevate your BFCM customer experience.

Four things every one of you can do in just a few minutes.

Let’s keep this tactical.

This email is brought to you by Wonderment, my retention swiss army knife. Wonderment is the easiest way to proactively set expectations on shipping timeframes, automatically update customers with delays, and measure shipping expectation vs reality across the business.

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I’m here on this fine Wednesday morning to bring four actionable and tactical ways to increase customer happiness this holiday season, so let’s get into it.

1. Setting expectations on shipping timelines: 

The idea: Black Friday is not just a super busy time for your brand, but also for all other brands that share the same 3PL as you do.

The shipping ecosystem is flooded in general, so I’d be incredibly shocked if anything gets delivered in time, and just as shocked if brands can fulfill as quickly as they usually do.

The tactic: Add a small bit of text in your post-purchase email that lets people know to expect a bit longer handling and/or shipping time.

Here are several email examples as to how to do it, and here’s how we are doing it at JRB:

Pro move: Don’t forget to message holiday shipping cutoff dates in the coming weeks as well!

2. Setting expectations on email response times: 

The idea: As the business sets in, email volume increases, and as great as your team is, don’t be surprised if they cannot possibly keep up with your standard response times.

The tactic: Set up a very basic automated response that comes from a human on your team.

Let your customers know how thankful you are that they chose you and that you are doing the best you can to get to emails ASAP, but to expect a bit of a delay as you navigate cooking a turkey dinner and fielding requests about DHL mess-ups. 🙃

Pro move: Also add a link to your FAQ to answer your top 2-3 questions.

3. Cater to your superfans: 

The idea: BFCM is a fantastic time for so many businesses in our universe, but very few think about their superfans.

The folks that supported you all year should get some extra special treatment this time of year too.

The tactic: Send a plain text email to your VIP customers and let them know about the sale you are running before everyone else is in on it.

However, do more than just say “here’s your opportunity to give us your money before anyone else.”

Write a letter from the heart. Thank them for what they’ve done for your brand this year. Let it come from the soul.

Here’s the one from Cody to our JRB VIP’s (blurred out sensitive info!)

4. Practice safe-selling with safety stock : 

The idea: We love the idea of crushing a sale and moving inventory, so much so that we hardly think about the lost-in-transit casualties, the possibility of goods damaged in transit, and some basic QA issues that may arise.

The tactic: Look at your tickets and stats to get a general idea of what percentage of orders you generally replace due to lost, damaged, QA, etc.

Add a solid buffer to that due to the BFCM chaos. Then get on a call with your ops team and plead with them to hold some extra stock just in case.

You’ll thank me later. 😛

That’s it for this week!

P.S. Wanna give me an early Hanukkah gift?

Take a listen to Cody and I's latest episode of the Down To Chat and let me know how you like it!We chatted about: Easy Ways to Increase AOV and Direct Response Tactics in DTC.

CX Chronicles:

Rumpl started off as “sleeping bag blankets” on Kickstarter and absolutely crushed it. Since that initial Kickstarter success, Rumpl has grown from a single homemade sleeping bag blanket to a whole line of blankets and technical comfort products that redefine the category.

Jacob Cantu is the CX manager at Rumpl and part of our amazing and thriving CX friends Discord. Thanks for joining, Jacob!

What’s your CX philosophy?

Keep it simple. It’s one of Rumpl’s core values and resonates with me on a couple of levels. The first reason is for customers. I don’t think it’s any surprise that customers are generally more satisfied if they don’t have to lift a finger to find a solution. The more we can provide solutions like that, the better.

The second reason is for our CX team, myself included. When we know our platforms so well, it can be easy to try to over hack a solution, confusing the customer with CX mumbo jumbo instead of providing a simple fix. At the end of the day, I want our team to ask ourselves: “what does the customer want?” and “how can we best provide that?”. If we can do that, it will lead to good things for our customers and for us.

In the words of the iconic Michael Scott, “‘K-I-S-S. Keep it simple, stupid.’ Great advice. Hurts my feelings every time.”

Your favorite Rumpl CX story?

We’re lucky to have many rad Rumpl customers with incredible stories, but my favorite in recent memory has to be the sailing team at a high school in South Carolina. While doing some Instagram ticket work in Gorgias, I noticed several tickets from an account tagging us in several stories and posts. All of them were memes. Now our product is not particularly cheap and high school students aren’t our usual customers, so these memes were all requests for sponsorship. I couldn’t help appreciating the efforts and genuinely found the posts hilarious. Kudos to Gen Z.

This was at the same time our marketing team was working on highlighting unique customer stories, so I decided to follow up on this small sailing team from the opposite coast. I found the account deleted. Thankfully, I was able to track them down after some light digging. They shared how they discovered Rumpl (a teammate's mother’s cousin’s wife was an artist we collaborated with), what their favorite products are (pillowcases repurposed as dry bags and our blankets–being water resistantproved perfect for their sailing), and most importantly, what happened to the original meme Instagram account (deleted after a post went poorly received by the booster club).

After whipping up a blog post to share their story, we sent them some of our quick-drying towels and Rumpl-branded Hydroflasks for the rest of their season. Engaging with these unique customers was a huge refresh in understanding who we can make an impact on as a brand!